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Improving signups and engagement through experience innovation

Industry
Media & Events • Established business
Role
Design Sprints • Strategy • UX
Duration
4 months

Incisive Media is a prominent player in digital media and events, delivering high-value content catering to audiences across the financial services, technology, and sustainability sectors.

Competition in this B2B content space increases each year. Incisive Media's competitive advantage includes its research and reporting expertise, with a loyal following of professionals. Highlighting their value to new prospects (and creating a compelling membership proposition) is critical to maintaining this enviable market position.

In 2020, they engaged the renowned agency Clearleft to lead a customer-centred redesign of all nine Incisive brands aimed at strengthening their offering and helping meet ambitious revenue targets.

Clearleft contracted me to lead the user experience design process, including the planning and co-facilitation of two back-to-back Design Sprints.

From Discovery to Design Sprints

Following a short research phase, findings from our time with customers and internal stakeholders helped us identify candidates for two Design Sprints using the Google Venture Design Sprint model. 

Sprint One would focus on the future of content and how Incisive could deliver its insight in new ways. How could we surface relevant content for subscribers and enhance the consuming experience?

The second Sprint focused on framing the proposition. How could we highlight the value of a subscription more effectively and make signup as seamless as possible?

The outcome of both Sprints was a more precise definition of the opportunities we needed to explore further in our final phase: detailed digital product design.

Exploring new patterns for a multi-site design system

The final output for the project would be a multi-site design system to allow Incisive to roll out our improvement across their digital estate.

But to get there, we had first to explore the hypotheses from our Sprints. As a team, we explored new concepts for content landing pages with a more robust hierarchy, articles that highlighted insights more effectively, and paywall models that encouraged signups with meaningful trials and strong framing of the value proposition.

Working closely again with talented content strategist Heather Atchison, we refined and tested prototypes that included language and microcopy that would highlight customer benefits while simplifying the membership proposition.

After several rounds of testing, we were happy we'd landed on some breakthrough concepts and patterns. Telling the story of the journey to this point helped reassure stakeholders ahead of work to formalise the new patterns into a design system. Clearleft's talented development team led this final phase, and you can learn more about this part of the project (and more detail about earlier phases) through Clearleft's case study of the project.

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